Experimentation paid off - documents added to eBook reader.
My Kindle can read PDF's and most electronics come with their documentation on PDF these days, I thought that was pretty cool, but really, PDF's are to rigid, they suck on a screen as small as a normal Kindles. It's handy to put the manuals on there anyways, but there's too much hunting and scrolling.
I decided to set up a process to put useful info onto my reader for reference when Internet access may not be available. I chose the Wikipedia IEC 60320 page as my Guinea pig for two reasons, it's quite useful and it has that huge table full of images which is very inconvenient to export.
I started out by using the "print" link on the Wikipedia page, good move and it is the only version of the page I suggest playing with. I then started making custom page formats on my Linux machine specifying a gray scale printer on a piece of paper the size of my Kindle screen. Not bad really, it looked good but I had to adjust my fonts ahead of time and the right side of the huge info table was truncated.
I started reading up on using Calibre, which I've already used to convert Google's epub books to .mobi files on the less than open format friendly Kindle, turns out it can convert HTML also. I wasn't able to find a way to actually open a page in the Calibre program, it's a but stubborn and right now it crashes every time I push the ALT key, but it actually works really well outside of that. I found if I use the "Save Page As" option in Chrome (other browsers should work also) and I make sure the "Complete" option is selected at the bottom, not just HTML, and save it I can right-click the HTML file and open it with Calibre. From that point all I have to do is convert it, a basic feature of the program and use the Send to Device option. This isn't just for Kindle either, you can just as easily use another format, like epub.
This is by far the best experiment I've done. The PDF's look nice, but have the rigidity and right side truncation issues I mentioned earlier. If I were to go and get a Kindle DX it would be another story, but I'm not shelling out that kind of money for one of those. When I get to the big table of connectors the actual ebook format lets me use the cursor to pan the table, not exactly fluid, but a hell of a lot nicer than not having the info. As an added bonus the links in the original HTML document open the built in browser, but I'm trying not to rely on that too much since I'm not always in Internet range when I need my documentation.
My next experiment may be to see if I can convert those documentation PDF's I get into an actual useful ebook format.
I decided to set up a process to put useful info onto my reader for reference when Internet access may not be available. I chose the Wikipedia IEC 60320 page as my Guinea pig for two reasons, it's quite useful and it has that huge table full of images which is very inconvenient to export.
I started out by using the "print" link on the Wikipedia page, good move and it is the only version of the page I suggest playing with. I then started making custom page formats on my Linux machine specifying a gray scale printer on a piece of paper the size of my Kindle screen. Not bad really, it looked good but I had to adjust my fonts ahead of time and the right side of the huge info table was truncated.
I started reading up on using Calibre, which I've already used to convert Google's epub books to .mobi files on the less than open format friendly Kindle, turns out it can convert HTML also. I wasn't able to find a way to actually open a page in the Calibre program, it's a but stubborn and right now it crashes every time I push the ALT key, but it actually works really well outside of that. I found if I use the "Save Page As" option in Chrome (other browsers should work also) and I make sure the "Complete" option is selected at the bottom, not just HTML, and save it I can right-click the HTML file and open it with Calibre. From that point all I have to do is convert it, a basic feature of the program and use the Send to Device option. This isn't just for Kindle either, you can just as easily use another format, like epub.
This is by far the best experiment I've done. The PDF's look nice, but have the rigidity and right side truncation issues I mentioned earlier. If I were to go and get a Kindle DX it would be another story, but I'm not shelling out that kind of money for one of those. When I get to the big table of connectors the actual ebook format lets me use the cursor to pan the table, not exactly fluid, but a hell of a lot nicer than not having the info. As an added bonus the links in the original HTML document open the built in browser, but I'm trying not to rely on that too much since I'm not always in Internet range when I need my documentation.
My next experiment may be to see if I can convert those documentation PDF's I get into an actual useful ebook format.